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The Nature of Our Abiding In Christ - St. John 15

The following is an excerpt of my sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, '06:

We must “continue in his love;” there is to be an ongoing vital relationship between the vine and the branches, for which the branches themselves have a responsibility. Since our spiritual welfare depends on our abiding in the vine, how we are to abide in the vine becomes a very important question for us.

To know how we are to abide in the vine, we need to understand more of what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of himself as the vine. We need to know what we are to abide in. As Bishop N. T. Wright explains in a recent commentary on this passage, there are two ways to understand how Jesus is our vine. We are grafted into the vine through a corporate connection and a private connection.

First of all, to understand what I mean by a corporate connection, consider that Jesus’ calling himself a vine was not an arbitrary allusion. He could have likened himself to a tree, for example, but he did not. He chose to speak of a vine. Why? It is because the vine was symbolic of the Old Testament church.

Here read Psalm 80:8f; Jeremiah 2:5f; and lastly, Isaiah 5:1-7.

... you can see that the image of the Old Testament church as a vine in a vineyard was a common one. It is no wonder that the apostle Paul picks up this image in his epistle to the Romans, chapter 11, to talk about the New Covenant Church.

So we learn that, when Jesus called himself the “true vine” he was saying that he is the true Church. It is in Him that all believers relate to God. To quote Wright: “…it is a way of speaking of himself as Israel-in-person, and of his followers as members of God’s true people because they belong to him.” (John for Everyone, Part II, p.70). This understanding compares favorably with the image of the Church in the New Testament of the Body. The Church is one being, if you will. Jesus is the head and we are his body. As his body’s members, we are joined together in the same life, as the branches to the vine, and, because we are in him, we are in the Church.

This means, then, that if we are to abide in him, we must abide in the Church. As Wright says, “We must remain in the community that knows and loves him and celebrates him as its Lord. There is no such thing as a solitary Christian. We can’t ‘go it alone’.” Thus, it is no wonder that Jesus says that the way we continue in his love, the way we abide in him, is to keep his command to love one another. This is a command you cannot keep by yourself. You have to belong to a community of people so you can love them and they can love you. We who are brought into the loving fellowship of the Trinity are brought into a life of love, and in that we are brought into that life of love together, we are to manifest it, bearing the fruit of it, by our love for one another.

This is really what the abiding of John 15 is about: the corporate manner in which we abide in Jesus. The pietistic tradition in which I was brought up as a Christian totally missed this. The abiding was understood as an abiding in a personal and private manner. I now believe this is the wrong way to take this passage.

However, though Jesus does not expressly speak of it here, there nevertheless does have to be a private manner in which we abide. Wright mentions this as well. It is not possible to maintain our relationships with one another in the Church if we are not being watchful over our own hearts in our own personal relationship with the Lord. Though He does not expressly speak of this private abiding, we can find a place for logically inferring the private manner of abiding in chapter 15 in Jesus prefacing his command for us to love one another by saying in verse 10: “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love.” Here Jesus speaks of all the things he has commanded, not just the corporate commands. The commands he gives us that apply to us personally would thus be included in verse 10.

So here we have the answer to our question: how do I abide in the vine? I abide in the vine by obeying Jesus’ command to maintain a loving relationship with my fellow believers in the Church and I abide by keeping close to Jesus in my own heart by seeking to follow all he has taught me. It's rather objective.

Of course, all of this is done by faith. After all, Jesus tells us in verse 5, “apart from me, ye can do nothing.” Everything he tells us to do requires spiritual life to do it, but we do not have spiritual life in ourselves. Jesus is the life. Spiritual life is something we receive as a gift from Jesus by the hand of faith. As Jesus said, “He who believes in me has everlasting life;” that is, the life of the Vine. So, on his part, as he says in chapter 15, he has chosen us and grafted us into him, but on our part, we have responded to his call to be grafted into him by faith. Being so grafted, having this life by faith, we enjoy the life of the vine by faith as well, for we abide by faith; we cannot abide in any other way.

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